The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 3,906 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 148 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Smit: Manganese ensures Ocean Minerals' profitability despite cobalt and nickel price crashes
“With the recent crash of the cobalt price and nickel For all sorts of reasons, and that's the topic for a whole different discussion, but particularly those two metals with the depression on their prices, our project remains profitable, and the reason it's pro…”
Nuclear and gas lead times make batteries the immediate grid solution
“Nukes are probably five or 10 or more years out. New gas generation. You can't get a new gas generator for probably four or six years at the very shortest. And so the most immediate and economical solution is really that those renewables and batteries.”
At least three or four advanced nuclear reactor developers will succeed
“I'm very comfortable that, there's going to be, you know, probably three or four at least that are going to make it through that part of it that will be successful in the long term.”
Light water reactors deploy in early 2030s; non-light water in late 2030s
“The early thirties is the light water reactors, and the late thirties is when we'll see commercially more of the non-light water reactors coming to fore.”
Light water reactors carry zero technology risk, only field construction challenges
“So, for light water reactor technology there really isn't a technology risk, it's just, Pulling together the right pieces to, you know, de-risk it in the front end to get to a final investment decision and then start construction and have a solid plan to be su…”
Nuclear plant development timelines will fall from eight to five years
“I do see a path by which you get down to, from the seven to eight years, we're looking at the first ones, to getting down to five or six years, which to me really makes a game changer when people have their planning horizons.”
Permitting new transmission lines is globally harder than building nuclear plants
“It's going to be easier to permit and get a nuclear plant built than it is to get new transmission lines, and that's just historically how it's been, you know, everywhere I've been, whether it's in the US, the UK, Australia. Over in Taiwan Philippines, people …”
Mature SMR capital costs will reach $10,000 per kilowatt
“Once you get down the curve, we're probably, you know, 10,000 dollars a kilowatt, so if you have a 600 megawatt plant, that'd be about six billion dollars. The first one might be, you know, 15, 20% more than that.”
Brown: Individual AI adoption equals hundreds of millions of new HVACs
“Like if you think about the idea that maybe as each individual having kind of an AI co-pilot, that's the equivalent of like having hundreds of millions of new HVAC systems all of a sudden being put onto the grid.”
Brown: VPPs cost 60% of natural gas peakers or less
“We believe that a VPP similar capacity resource would be 60% of the cost of a natural gas peaker investment. And honestly, that's probably outdated because now we know that natural building natural gas peakers are even more expensive.”
Brown: VPPs cost 40% of utility-scale battery installations
“And it would be, and the VPP would also be 40% of the cost of a utility scale battery investment.”
Schroepfer: Customers buy savings, making 'climate tech' a confusing category label
“I would actually say it even slightly stronger, which is we use this word climate tech like it's an actual good definition of a market segment. When we just talked about like, I sell products to consumers that save the money. I'll sell products to consumers th…”
Chaset: Data center grid expansion is overhyped due to regulatory bottlenecks
“There's only so much connection capacity in the system and the ability to sort of expand connection capacity is reliant on utilities who are then in turn reliant on the regulatory commissions to give them authority to build new things. And the timescales at wh…”
Schroepfer: Well-funded tech companies will build massive power capacity globally
“Underhyped in the sense that I like Respectfully disagree with Nick, which is just look at NVIDIA's earning calls. Like people are buying those chips and powering them up. So, and I think companies are, I spent a lot of time being incredibly creative about fin…”
Schroepfer: Economically viable fusion will produce history's largest companies
“And so I think this is a very binary thing, that if we can actually hit unit economics that are competitive in fusion, It'll create the largest companies we've ever seen.”
Schroepfer: Nature-based carbon removal will hit sub-$100/ton surprisingly fast
“I think we will be shocked at how fast, low cost, particularly nature-based carbon removal systems, and when I say nature-based, I don't mean planting trees. I mean, enhanced rock weathering. I mean, ocean alkalinity enhancement. I mean, biochar. These are sys…”
Schroepfer: Consumer demand response is overhyped due to fragmentation and friction
“I'm gonna say consumer sort of demand response is overhyped. It's just, like, so damn hard to get consumers to sign up for these things, and it's such a fragmented Market that getting to reasonable scales is hard.”
Schroepfer: AI does not solve climate tech's manufacturing scale-up bottleneck
“AI for material science, great for discovering new materials. The manufacturing scale-up is usually the hard part. So great, I've got this new MOF. I've got to make a lot of it very cheaply. The AI doesn't really help me very much with that. Like, in theory, m…”
Gariman: China will increasingly weaponize rare earth export controls for geopolitical leverage
“And my strong belief is the process for export control will be utilized a bit more in the future. And this will basically signal again that China is not really reliable on sourcing of rare earth magnets in the future as we go forward because they will use it a…”
Waters: SMRs will not be a viable power source until the mid-2030s
“The challenge there is that between permitting and technology development that needs to happen, you're probably talking about, you know, mid 20 thirties before you see that become a real play.”
LFP battery pricing could drop to $25 per kWh within years
“There's a decent likelihood we'll continue to see pricing go down. You know, I've heard some claims that you could see it go down as far as, you know, from 50 dollars down to even 25 dollars over the course of the next couple of years. I think it's realistic t…”
Waters: 8- to 12-hour storage applications will emerge and surpass LFP
“But you will start to see more eight-hour, twelve-hour type applications emerging. And I think as that happens, you'll see other technologies kick into gear that will enable that better than LFP.”
Friedmann: Gas with CCS builds in half the time of nuclear
“They can build a natural gas with CCS plant in roughly half the time in which they could build a nuclear plant.”
Friedmann: New gas with full CCS costs $70–$100/MWh in the US
“In the U.S., assuming three dollars per million BTU for natural gas, on a new build, All costs. That means cost of capture, compression, transportation, storage, and permitting. You're looking at 70 to a hundred dollars a megawatt hour.”
Friedmann: Secretary Wright is proposing cuts to Congressionally approved clean energy programs
“We are seeing Secretary Wright propose a set of cuts to programs that were approved by Congress and approved by the prior DOE. In some cases, Congress, I mean the contracts have already been made, and this is part of the broader rescission around clean energy.…”
Friedmann: Congress is highly likely to preserve 45Q and 45V tax credits
“With respect to Forty-five-Q and other tax credits in the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act I give high odds That they will sustain, 45 Q, 45 V related projects.”
Stadler: Microgrid power costs reach 3-4¢/kWh including capex over 20 years
“We really get down to three, four cents, including all the capital that we installed there, and we model actually escalation on the electricity side by 10% every year, and natural gas also going up by five percent every year. But still, at the end of the analy…”
Smith-Eppsteiner: AI companies face 40% to 70% gross margins from inference costs
“Like, inference cost is non-trivial. I think for a bunch of the AI companies, both in our portfolio and that we've seen you know, this is, like, not going to be a 90% margin SaaS. Like, we may be talking about 40 to 70% gross margin based on inference costs.”
Norris: 0.5% data center curtailment unlocks 98 gigawatts of capacity
“At 0.5% flexibility or curtailment of the new data center load, you could add up to 98 gigawatts of new data centers across the U.S. And at 0.25% curtailment of the new load, you could add 76 gigawatts.”
Koomey: Rebound effects from efficiency gains are typically only 10 to 20%
“Yes, the car's a little bit cheaper, and yes, people drive a little bit more, but generally, these effects tend to be kind of small. They tend to be kind of 10 to 20%.”
Koomey: OpenAI lacks an obvious path to profitability without massive growth
“Open AI right now is just a major, it's hemorrhaging cash like you can't believe, right? There's no obvious way that they become profitable without a massive increase in the demand for their services and the ability to raise the cost, and that is really unclea…”
Koomey: AI industry will pivot to massive efficiency gains under infrastructure constraints
“Between those various, ah, improvements that you can get beyond just shrinking transistors and making things closer together, there's orders of magnitude possibility for improving efficiency, and so my sense is that the, you know, the focus has been basically …”
Kann: US data center capacity will more than double by 2030
“I was on the side of, we will see total capacity of data centers as measured in megawatts, or gigawatts, I guess, really double by twenty-thirty, and I was on the side that we will see it more than double.”
Koomey: US data center load will double once more then level out
“It would not surprise me if You know, we saw another doubling, but I would say, you know, probably that's about it. I think that's going to level out, and then people are going to be more efficient at what they're doing based on the history”
Datar: Cultivated meat startups shouldn't attempt full vertical integration early on
“If we actually think about a world where food is grown from cells, we need a really robust, diverse kind of economy behind it with many different players and so on. We can't just come out of the gate vertically integrated like the meat industry today.”
Datar: Cultivated meat is in the 'trough of disillusionment' but will happen
“We're in this kind of trough of disillusionment, as they call it in the hype cycle terminology, where people are like, what do you mean this thing will never happen, it's been way too long, when actually, it will happen, it's just, now we've kind of set oursel…”
Datar: Venture capital is improperly subsidizing basic research in emerging tech
“It's a lot easier to be a private company raising VC money to do research, which is ultimately should just be basic research, because the stuff that's going to be competitive and on the market probably can't happen until that first research happens.”
Datar: Cultivated meat regulatory approvals are investor milestones, not commercial rollouts
“I don't always know if the approvals are like the most significant thing. Like to me, they kind of read like a investor milestone more than a, oh, this is just like the last stop before we blow our product up on the market kind of thing.”
Yao: Claiming sodium-ion is inherently safer than lithium-ion is objectively wrong
“Saying kind of a blanket statement that Sodium ion is safer than lithium ion. I can tell you that is objectively wrong, right?”
Yao: Manufacturing scale alone won't make sodium-ion cheaper than LFP
“It's not about scale. It's not about just taking the chemistries and sodium mine today and then scaling the hell out of it... What drives the cost at the end is the materials intensity... Just focusing on scale won't get us there.”
Yao: Anode-free sodium-ion battery cells could reach $40 to $50/kWh
“An anode-free sodium ion cell is one of the most competitive technologies out prices out there, because you don't have a negative electrode material that, that adds to cost, as well as the ability to really increase energy density. Those numbers can get to pot…”
Yao: CATL's CEO projects sodium-ion taking half of the LFP market
“Robin Zhang, the chairman and CEO of CATL, announced basically last November that he expects Sodium Mines to take up to half of LFP's market share.”
Kimber: Data centers are entering an era where grid connection is optional
“Generally speaking, I think we're moving into an era where grid connection is optional and should be optional. And that, you know, we should be able to, you know, operate these things fully off grid if necessary.”
Kimber: Hybrid renewables and gas engines beat new combined-cycle plants
“If you go build a CCGT right now for 2000 dollars KW and, you know, like you can't even find sort of like You know, labor unions and pipe fitters and whatnot that have ever even built these things in many cases, right? You know, it's going to take five, six ye…”
Kimber: AI data centers will never offer flexible power load
“Every second you aren't running that at a hundred percent capacity factor is enormous amortized cost, right? So that it's just, it's one of those things where it's like, you'd be a fool to turn it down. You have to at some points because operationally, you kno…”
Kimber: Edge LLMs trigger recursive queries, massively multiplying datacenter power demand
“Every smaller distilled LLM that is power efficient doing inference is going to launch thousands of queries to bigger, more capable models that can actually reason their way through buying something on Amazon and reason. So it's almost like increasing the worl…”
Kimber: AI inference will ultimately draw far more power than training
“I think now what we're seeing is that inference in the aggregate is actually probably a much larger draw than the training in the long run.”
Bullard: China's apparent oil demand likely peaked in 2023
“In terms of apparent demand, which is what the statistic is called, and it's basically looking at refinery runs in, in China, it's, looks like it's peaked at some point in 23 and the new data that was published as of yesterday morning shows that actually, stat…”